Faith and Volunteering at Midlife: Variation by Religious Continuity, Discontinuity, or Initiation Since Childhood?

Volunteer service is an integral part of civic life in America. Prior research consistently finds that highly religious people spend the most time volunteering, but few studies assess the role of religious stability and change through the life course. This study focuses on exposure to religiosity in...

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Publicado en:Sociology of Religion Vol. 87; no. 1; pp. 109 - 133
Autores principales: Upenieks, Laura, Schafer, Markus H
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: Oxford University Press / USA Spring2026
Materias:
Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
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        10.1093/socrel/srae038
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        atl: Faith and Volunteering at Midlife: Variation by Religious Continuity, Discontinuity, or Initiation Since Childhood?
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          Upenieks, Laura
          Schafer, Markus H
        affil: Baylor University, USA
      su:
        Faith
        Volunteer service
        Middle age
        Religiousness
        Life course approach
        Attendance
      sug:
        subj:
          Faith
          Volunteer service
          Middle age
          Religiousness
          Life course approach
          Attendance
      keyword:
        attendance
        copyrightHolder:Association for the Sociology of Religion
        copyrightYear:2026
        counterfactual mediation
        inLanguage:en
        life course
        publisher:Oxford University Press
        religiosity
        sameAs:https://dx.doi.org/10.1093/socrel/srae038
        volunteering
        attendance
        copyrightHolder:Association for the Sociology of Religion
        copyrightYear:2026
        counterfactual mediation
        inLanguage:en
        life course
        publisher:Oxford University Press
        religiosity
        sameAs:https://dx.doi.org/10.1093/socrel/srae038
        volunteering
      ab: Volunteer service is an integral part of civic life in America. Prior research consistently finds that highly religious people spend the most time volunteering, but few studies assess the role of religious stability and change through the life course. This study focuses on exposure to religiosity in childhood and the (dis)continuity of religiosity into adulthood, as well as cases where people become more or less religious as adults. Drawing on nationally representative longitudinal data from the MIDUS study (N = 3,025), our results suggest that childhood religiosity, in isolation, does not provide a sufficient account of adulthood volunteering. Rather, people raised in highly religious childhood homes volunteered several more hours per year than those from less religious homes only if they carried religious importance forward into midlife. Moreover, people sustaining high religiosity from childhood to adulthood reported slightly more total volunteering hours than those who decreased and increased their religious importance over time after adjusting for baseline hours of volunteering. Counterfactual mediation analyses suggest that religious attendance partially mediates each of these associations, highlighting the importance of religious communities in encouraging volunteerism.
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      doctype: Article
      src: R
    language: English
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